7 Comments

WD already has a presence in the SDD market through HGST products, as the article noted. I wonder if the STEC acquisition is more about gaining more/better access to flash chip supplies that STEC had contracts for. As other articles point out, the market has the big players with flash fabs (Samsung Micron Toshiba Intel) then folks like WD, STX, and a raft of others without flash fabs. In the second group, the bigger your fistful of contracts, the better.Reply

Actually STEC had not sold any drives to EMC for quite some time. They got famous for a one time buy from EMC. STEC has been in hot water from investors for a long time and their chairman was investigated by SEC. STEC really has no OEM customers now to speak of.The only way this works for WD is if they remove all management and finance people from STEC.Reply

STEC had flash purchase agreements with Samsung, but has switched to Toshiba in the last year or two. That switch and a two year late ASIC set STEC back tremendously. Still, I think if HGST had pushed out a PCI-e flash product I don't think they would have bought STEC.

Remember that WD and SanDisk agreed earlier this year to work on hybrid HDD/flash drives. That might give WD access to some NAND for other products (or maybe not). Reply

This has nothing to do with Arm infiltration and everything to do with rotating platters(Tradition Hard Drives) being noncompetitive against ssd in terms of performance.Also embedded NAND in MCP(Multi chip packages) or e-MMC currently still contain an individual controller.Your second point should be reversed to state SSD devices contain a controller which may use an ARM chip or something much more custom. WD currently uses some arm chips for HDD controllers as well.Reply